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Nobody knows for sure exactly what Vladimir Putin is doing with around 100,000 Russian troops parked near the Russia-Ukraine border, but it’s making the US and Europe extremely nervous.
President Joe Biden said this week he expected the Russians would “move in” and that a slight incursion would be met differently than a full-on invasion.
The US has spent the past few days cleaning up that remark and making clear any type of invasion is unacceptable.
Asked in Geneva by a reporter if he thought, like Biden, that an invasion was likely, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov used some interesting language.
“Unless the United States doesn’t go to bed with Ukraine, I don’t think so,” Lavrov said.
What does it mean for countries to ‘go to bed’? All of this high-stakes geopolitical chess, then, comes down to how intimate the US gets with Ukraine in the eyes of Russia.